Re: PPP setup

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com> writes:

    Jim> Next question (I hear you cry) Pine sends mail but I assume I
    Jim> need some kind of mail daemon that starts when ppp is fired
    Jim> up so that Pine knows incoming mail is there. Any
    Jim> suggestions? sendmail seems like overkill for a dynamic
    Jim> dial-up IP connection.

You have a shell account at harenet; they probably support POPmail.
You can use a POPmail client to get your mail.  To verify that they
support POPmail before customer support replies (you may need some
kind of authenitcation or permissions anyway) you can telnet to ports
109 (POPmail v.2) and 110 (POPmail v.3) and see if something answers.

You'll need a popmail client.  There was something about that in a
recent issue of Linux Journal, I'll look it up when I get home.  There
was even a shell script that you could stick into your ppp script to
look for mail every time you connect, and then you could also put it
in a crontab to check every 30 minutes (or whatever) if you stay
logged in to Linux that long (it could even be set up to automgically
dial out, I guess).

Limitations of POPmail: only one mailbox!  If you'd like to set up
several mailboxes for different users (your wife, your kids, your
business mail vs personal mail, webmaster) then Sendmail or Smail is
*not* overkill.  Both Sendmail and Smail come in preconfigured
versions for Linux.  They're not easy if the preconfigured version
doesn't work out of the box, but if you're heading in the direction of
being an ISP (Ho, Ho Ho!), and it sounds like you are given your
interests and the fact that you live in an Internet desert, you might
want to play with them.  They're not overly hard, either, as long as
you're just doing local service and not handling mail exchange for a
whole network.  (The rewrite rules for sendmail addressing are blody
recondite.)

I have had good luck with using procmail as my local delivery agent
with smail, although it creates some weird bugs if you forget it's
there.  procmail is a nice filtering program, definitely better than
Elm's (last I checked about a year ago), but it can be installed as
the local delivery agent, and that's nice.  Ask me again if you decide
to go that route.

I'll add that to my list of stuff to write about (#1 being
Ghostscript; new public release is rumored for June, *with PDF=="Adobe
Acrobat format" reading and writing*!  I need to see if Ghostview can
be hacked to handle PDF.)  :-)

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Socio-Economic Planning       http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com